16 "For the Lord himself will come down from
heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of
the archangel and with the trumpet call of God,
and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that,
we who are still alive and are left will be caught
up together with them in the clouds to meet the
Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord
forever."

The word rapture comes from the Latin rapturus which
is the Vulgate translation here rendered caught
up. Indeed, it is true that there will come
a time when living believers in Christ will be taken
up into clouds.

What Protestants miss is that this
coincides with the Second Coming ("For the Lord
himself will come down from heaven . . . and the dead
in Christ will rise first").

They appeal to various prophecies in Daniel and
Revelation to justify the idea that there will be
a period of time between this event and the end of
the world, but fundamentally, this happens at the
end of time.

Some believe that it will happen before a 7-year
period of tribulation

Others believe it happens during the 7-year period
of tribulation

Some believe it will happen at the end.

Most all believe that this tribulation will be
followed by a 1,000 period (which they extract from
Revelation) in which Christ rules the earth from
Jerusalem. At the end of that period, there will
supposedly be another battle with Satan and then
comes the final Judgment.

The fact is: they have so many theories that you
can't pin it down.

The Church rejects the idea of a future millennium.
When Christ returns that is it. It's all over; there
is a final judgment. The 1,000-year period discussed
in Revelation is most likely figurative speech for
the Church Age.

Some (a clear minority of) Catholic Scholars believe
that it does not refer to a future or present time
period, rather, they believe it refers to the period
in Israel's history, prior to Christ's first coming.

As Eric said, as Catholic's we do believe in a rapture,
although we don't often call it that. We certainly
don't believe that the Church will be taken out of
the world prior to the Anti-Christ or the last Tribulation.
Even the year period is on shaky ground. In many
ways, that period described in Revelation and Daniel
parallels what happened in the 7 years prior to destruction
of the Temple in 70 A.D., so much of that prophecy
may have been fulfilled.

Nevertheless, we do believe those Christians who
are still alive when Christ returns will be transformed
by the Cloud of His Glory at the resurrection of
the dead.

John

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